The (Un)Making of Milosevic
by Louis Sell
In the evening of April 24, 1987, in the shabby hamlet of Kosovo Polje, an obscure Balkan politician stepped between a line of policemen and a crowd of Serbs protesting their mistreatment by Kosovo's majority Albanian population. The words he spoke now ring with irony, but in 1987 they electrified all of Serbia. "No one will beat you again," Slobodan Milosevic declared.
Counting on a newsworthy confrontation, local activists had gathered several thousand Serbs outside the hall where Milosevic was scheduled to speak. They chanted slogans, pushed against a police cordon, and threw rocks that had been stockpiled for the occasion. Milosevic waded into the crowd --at a moment when journalists on the scene said they heard the unmistakable sound of AK-47s being pulled back to their firing positions-and began an extraordinary all-- night performance. He called upon the Serbs to resist what they claimed was Albanian pressure to leave Kosovo. "This is your country, your homes and fields and memories are here," he cried. As he warmed to his subject, Milosevic raised the stakes. "Yugoslavia cannot exist without Kosovo. Yugoslavia and Serbia will not give up Kosovo."
Before the spectacle of Kosovo Polje, Milosevic had shown few signs of being anything more than a typical Communist apparatchik. As the party boss of Belgrade during the mid-1980s, he was known among his subordinates as "Little Lenin" for his habit of barking out commands while striding about his office. But Milosevic made two fateful discoveries that night in Kosovo: the raw force of Serb nationalism and the power of his own straightforward style of public speaking. Over the next several years he exploited these lessons to tragic effect, first seizing complete power in Serbia, and then, when he failed to dominate all of Yugoslavia, seeking to unite all of the Serbs throughout Yugoslavia under his own rule in a Greater Serbia, in the full knowledge that such a course would lead to war.
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